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YE SHALL BE FREE
(Commencement Sermon at University
of Arkansas - by the Rev. Blake
Smith, D.D.)
Any serious effort to discover a purpose for living
must take into account the nature of the times in which
our lives are cast. We may learn all that the books can
tell us about the first or the ninth or the fifteenth
centuries, but we must live in the twentieth century. No
college graduate ought to dodge or ignore his responsibil-
ity to understand the deeper elements that are at work in
his world. This enormous store of effort and money shall
have been a sheer waste on anyone who takes the technical
skills that have been acquired, and then goes out to use
them for personal gain, or who busies himself with trifling
matters that in the long run are of no consequence. The
tragedy of Rip van Winkle was not that he got drunk and
neglected his family, though that was bad enough. The real
tragedy of Rip van Winkle was that he slept through the
entire Revolutionary War and never fired a shot; in fact, he
never knew what was going on. That is the tragedy of any
life that is lived without some awareness of the revolutionary
nature of this age.
What, then, is the basic and fundamental nature of this
revolutionary crisis in which our lives are cast, whether
we wish it to be so or not?
Risking oversimplification, it can be said that the
major disorders within our civilization stem from an erosion,

YE SHALL BE FREE
(Commencement Sermon at University
of Arkansas - by the Rev. Blake
Smith, D.D.)
Any serious effort to discover a purpose for living
must take into account the nature of the times in which
our lives are cast. We may learn all that the books can
tell us about the first or the ninth or the fifteenth
centuries, but we must live in the twentieth century. No
college graduate ought to dodge or ignore his responsibil-
ity to understand the deeper elements that are at work in
his world. This enormous store of effort and money shall
have been a sheer waste on anyone who takes the technical
skills that have been acquired, and then goes out to use
them for personal gain, or who busies himself with trifling
matters that in the long run are of no consequence. The
tragedy of Rip van Winkle was not that he got drunk and
neglected his family, though that was bad enough. The real
tragedy of Rip van Winkle was that he slept through the
entire Revolutionary War and never fired a shot; in fact, he
never knew what was going on. That is the tragedy of any
life that is lived without some awareness of the revolutionary
nature of this age.
What, then, is the basic and fundamental nature of this
revolutionary crisis in which our lives are cast, whether
we wish it to be so or not?
Risking oversimplification, it can be said that the
major disorders within our civilization stem from an erosion,